Today, every business and brand needs a social media presence: fact. If you’re wondering how to go about doing this on a shoestring budget, you may be surprised at just how much you can accomplish for a minimal outlay.
Use the guide below to figure out what you need to focus on, the strategies to take on board, and how to make that tiny budget work as hard for you as possible.
Create an Audience-Relevant Strategy
If you’re working on a tight budget, it’s crucial to ensure that every cent spent counts – and this means focusing on the right people. Before committing any funds or writing a word of text for your pages, draw up a social media strategy. This should encompass exactly what you want to achieve with your social media presence and how you will do it.
As part of this strategy, you need to get really clear on your target audience. Knowing exactly who your potential customers are will help you determine everything from the tone of the text to the type of content you post. Meaning no wasted social media dollars.
Make the Most of Free Design Tools
Impact is absolutely vital in social marketing – after all, you need to stand out in a very large crowd. Just because you’re on a budget, however, doesn’t mean you can’t access great extras for your social pages.
Platforms such as Createlist offer a range of free digital assets, including royalty-free stock footage and, music and sound effects to uplevel your social media and add some serious professionalism to your pages. Here, you’ll also find free, high-quality video-editing templates to uplevel your content still further.
Enhance Your Organic Reach
Organic reach is one of the most important tools in your social media arsenal – it’s not only worth its weight in gold, it’s free! To optimize it, there are several key steps to take.
Optimize All Your Social Media Profiles
There are lots of simple ways to optimize your platforms and pages for SEO, and many of these are simply about ensuring that your profiles are perfect. Create an easy-to-remember username, and use a consistent brand logo and slogan. Deploy keyword-rich descriptions throughout the sites and always add a trackable link back to your website.
Post High-Quality Content – Without an Expiration Date
It goes without saying that posting regular, high-quality content that’s error-free and adds value for the reader is an effective way to boost your organic reach. But also bear in mind that, where possible, your content should be evergreen and not have an expiration date. Sometimes, this can’t be done, and that’s fine, but try not to focus too much on content that’s too date-specific.
Interact with Your Followers
One of the best ways to power up your reach is to connect with your followers. Do this by regularly responding to posts and comments and posting user-generated content. Holding competitions and having online question-and-answer sessions for and with your followers are also good ways of getting the word out there and, ultimately, having more visitors find their way to your pages.
Enhance Accessibility
Ensuring your social media pages are as accessible as possible is important. Not only does this boost your page’s findability and credibility, but it’s the right thing to do. Plus, it allows as many people as possible to access, understand, and enjoy your content as possible.
Getting accessibility right is easy, and there are plenty of free online tools and guides to help you. It involves thinking about elements like contrasting page and font colors, which could make it difficult for those with visual impairments to read text, and attaching alt text to images used.
Consider Paid Ads
Okay, you’ve got a tight budget, but you may still want to think about running a small – and very targeted – pay-per-click advertising campaign to get folks coming through to your social media platforms. These types of ad campaigns are typically very effective, and offer great value for money when it comes to results against spend.
The Takeaway
Setting up a credible, professional social media presence on a very tight budget is entirely possible – you’ll just need to work smarter, not necessarily harder. Use the free tools that are out there – such as access to digital assets – and target your advertising efforts with laser precision. Having a comprehensive strategy in place before you create a second of content is one of the most important things you can do to ensure your efforts are focused in the right place.
